What Democrats Need To Be Saying Right Now

By Thor Benson  |  August 25, 2025 | 9:40am
Screenshot via KTVU Fox 2 San Francisco/YouTube
Elections Democrats
What Democrats Need To Be Saying Right Now

Since Donald Trump took office, Democrats have taken a wide array of approaches in attempting to respond to the extreme rhetoric and actions we’ve seen coming from this administration. Some centrist Democrats have tried to keep the conversation focused on “kitchen table” issues and insist on calling numerous disturbing incidents “distractions.” Others have taken up the mantle of  “fighters,” trying to more boldly and vocally challenge what’s happening.

The fighters here—ranging from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to California Gov. Gavin Newsom—have each tried their own method of attacking Trump’s actions. AOC barnstormed with the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” with Sen. Bernie Sanders, and her skill at using social media has not diminished.

In speeches, JB Pritzker doesn’t pull any punches, calling Trump and his policies out with humor and aggression. Newsom started off the year disastrously palling around with right-wing propagandists on a podcast, but he’s stepped up and started angrily challenging Trump over the past month or so. Your mileage may vary with his Trump-mocking social media troll game, but it is undeniably an attention-getter of an approach. 

David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, tells Splinter that looking like a fighter is “probably helpful” for any Democrat right now. 

“The things that you want in a comms strategy right now are things that, yes, will make [you] the center of attention,” Karpf said. “But, in particular, things that are going to piss off your opponents and lead them to make mistakes.”

He said if you’re a governor, like Newsom or Pritzker, there are things you can actually do in your state that could become “a problem” for Trump. You can do more to put obstacles in the way of his agenda than a member of Congress, like AOC.

What really annoys Karpf is what he calls “normal sauce moderates” — those kitchen-table-obsessed centrists, insisting that the actual chaos emanating from the Trump White House somehow doesn’t matter.

“That’s obnoxious in normal times, but the reason why it’s poison right now is that I think we need people to understand the actual scale of the damage and how long, even in the best case scenario, it’s going to take time to fix this,” Karpf said. 

This is a good example of what I’ve started calling “normalsauce democratic comms.”It sucks. The whole genre should be sent out to sea on a rickety boat. If your messaging is identical to what you would’ve said in 2017, you are failing and you ought to know better.

— Dave Karpf (@davekarpf.bsky.social) 2025-08-19T17:17:21.797Z

Beyond looking like a fighter, Karpf says Democrats need to be constantly pointing out that what’s happening is not normal, it’s dangerous, and it’s going to be a massive project to fix what’s been done whenever Democrats end up in power again. Otherwise, voters who are only somewhat paying attention won’t understand what’s happened and might get the wrong idea about what needs to happen in the future.

“Be clear that the damage is real and undoing it is going to be a real project. That’s critical,” Karpf said. “You need to force people to deal with these uncomfortable truths, because otherwise you’re just lying to yourselves. And if you’re lying to yourselves, and you’re also lying to the attentive public, then the attentive public will just turn to nihilism.” 

Getting their message out is not as easy for Democrats as it is for Republicans, Karpf says. Republicans spent decades building a media machine that gets their ideas into the ears of their base, and Democrats don’t have that — they have to make do with what’s available.

“They have to fight on the terrain that exists,” Karpf said. “In the medium-term, they desperately need a media apparatus that can compete with the conservative media machine. In the here and now, they’re stuck fighting uphill in the rain.”

 
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